Thought of the Day - June 4 2021 - Announcement from the WHO

Earlier this week there was a new announcement from the WHO. Was it new evidence in the hunt for the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus? Was it the result of new talks with western countries concerning the global sharing of vaccines? Could it be support for low-cost therapeutics? Of course not!

It was a new naming system for SARS-CoV-2 variants, well a few of them anyway. As you know for more than 100 years the colloquial convention was to use the name of the country or region that first discovered a new serious virus or variant. Or as we used to say back in school: "who smelt it, dealt it".

There is also a second more scientific and precise naming convention know as Pango Lineage (Pangolin for short) ( Thought of the Day - May 16 2021 - By the Numbers ) used to label all new variants in line with their origin.

But now the WHO has decided it is easier for them if we use their internal system. The one they use for variants that they decide to study. The WHO, as I guess it sounds kinda technical, uses greek letters to title these studies. Thus, no longer should the variant of concern first identified in Kent, UK be colloquially referred to as the UK variant or B.1.1.7. It is now called Alpha.

The WHO says that they are doing this so "No country should be stigmatized for detecting and reporting variants". Wow, guess they are coming late to the party, shouldn't Alpha be the original strain coming from China, or the first recognized variant of concern that was identified in Italy. I guess this is just political correctness gone mad; kind of like Canada's bold move to ban flights from Pakistan at the same time we banned flights from India so we were not seen to be singling out India.

Of course, Canada, due to our high case rates and active genomic screening, has had its fair share of variants. Luckily none have proven to be more transmissible and so most have died out. Among them: B.1.36.18, B.1.36.26, B.1.36.36, B.1.36.37, B.1.36.38, B.1.128, B.1.147, B.1.167, B.1.279, B.1.316, B.1.350, B.1.369.1, B.1.422, B.1.438.1, B.1.547, B.1.564.1, B.1.573, B.1.592, B.1.611, B.1.615, B.1.1.343, B.1.1.417, B.1.1.431. And, let's not forget "the BC variant": B.1.573

As we discussed last week, there is a new variant being studied in Vietnam. Referred to, at least last week, as the Vietnam double-variant ( Thought of the Day - June 1 2021 - Vietnam ). Well, this week it was confirmed it is derived from the Indian root variant B.617 "with some additional mutations". So just to be crystal clear. B.617.2, is the Indian variant, that is rampant, now called Delta. An earlier identified variant B.617.1 has just been added to the WHO list as Kappa, however, the WHO says is it declining so not to worry. The third Indian variant B.617.3 is nowhere on the WHO list. And the Vietnam-Indian variant? Who knows . . .

So, you can easily see how the new naming system has cleared things up? Yeah right, this is just "fiddling while Rome burns". Or to misquote Shakespeare, whom I hear is now also politically incorrect "It's all Greek to me".

Cheers

Cliff